It’s the first day of the lunar year of the horse, so happy New Year to all people who celebrate this holiday! I wish you and all your beloved ones a lot of happiness! And also, let’s hope that the horse is going to bring more success to all XR technologies!
And while my stomach is full of food and dumplings used to celebrate the new year, let me write for you the best XR news of the week! Luckily, writing just requires me to move my hands, because I don’t think I can move much more now…
Top news of the week
Meta sold 7+ million smartglasses in 2025
EssilorLuxottica shared the data on the sales of its glasses, and among them, there is a number that is very interesting for us XR people. According to the French-Italian company, the smartglasses built in collaboration with Meta, starting from the Ray-Ban Meta, sold in total more than 7 million units in 2025 alone. This means sales have tripled since the last report (which was 2M units sold for the first glasses). Luxottica also reports that the smartglasses are among its most successful products, and that the growth in the United States is somewhat exponential. These are all amazing indicators.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Meta has pivoted from VR to glasses. 7M units in one year alone is a staggering result for the XR sector: it is for sure much more than what Quest 3+3S have sold in the same year, and probably more than what they have sold since their release. And the numbers seem to grow even more, while the numbers of VR headsets are growing quite slowly.
The big difference lies in two things: one is the distribution; you can buy the Meta smartglasses when you just enter a shop to buy standard glasses, while VR headsets are only sold in some shops. And the second is the clear use case: people already know the utility of glasses/smartglasses, they actually actively enter shops to buy them, while VR headsets are a nice-to-have that do not have a strong use case among consumers yet.
More info (Meta smartglasses sold 7M units — Road To VR)
More info (Meta smartglasses sold 7M units — Upload VR)
Other relevant news
Meta’s CTO “confirms” Quest 4, and the work on AI and robotics
Finally, Alex Heath published thefull video of his interview with the CTO of Meta, Andrew “Boz” Bosworth. And there are a few interesting tidbits about it.
The part that the VR magazines have focused on is the one in which Boz has substantially confirmed that Meta is working on two headsets. We know from the rumors that one should be the Quest 4, more focused on gaming, and the other one the headset codenamed Puffin/Loma/Phoenix, which should basically be a more lightweight Vision Pro, focused on “spatial computing”. When Heath asked about the release date of these headsets, Boz did not answer at all.
But there are other interesting parts of the video that are worth mentioning. First of all, Boz confirmed that Ray-Ban Meta glasses are getting impressive retention. When I published the report of the 7M smartglasses units sold, some people replied that the number of sold units is not the most important metric: people can buy a device and then leave it on the shelf. But since the smartglasses sold by Meta are first of all stylish glasses, people use them a lot, and this confirms that the news above is actually great news for our space.
Boz then started talking about AI and the pivot of Meta away from the Llama models. Here, the interesting part is that he said that inside Meta, the team doing glasses and the team doing AI are working together. And the upcoming Meta AI model has been trained a lot with data from glasses. This means that, if Meta is doing its job well, the upcoming Meta AI may be one of the best AIs to be run when wearing smartglasses. This may be a huge differentiator both for the sales of smartglasses (people may prefer Meta smartglasses because of the software) and for the use of Meta AI models itself (the more smartglasses get popular, the more a model trained for glasses will be useful). So I think this is a great strategy.
And last, but not least, Meta is now also working on humanoid robots! I just wonder how they’ll apply their typical ads business to them: is it that if you don’t buy the products that the robot is advertising, it’s going to punch you?
More info (Full interview to Andrew Bosworth)
More info (Meta is still working on two headsets)
Meta may activate facial recognition on its smartglasses
Since the first moment we started fantasizing about AR glasses, one use case has immediately come to the mind of all of us: recognizing the faces of the people around us. This can be useful if we don’t remember exactly who the person that is talking to us is, or, for instance, to recognize interesting people at events that we attend. The use case is clear, but so are all the privacy implications. Scammers may pretend to know us more easily, people can spy on us, and so on. That’s why no company working on glasses has ever released this feature.
But now a report from the New York Times mentions that there are now internal debates at Meta about releasing this feature for the Ray-Ban Meta glasses. CNET’s journalist Scott Stein reports that “an internal company memo from 2025 cited in the Times story notes our current ‘dynamic political environment’ as a good landscape to launch a controversial feature like facial recognition, claiming that ‘many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns’ “. I personally find this pretty disgusting: I don’t know if what is reported is true, but if a company (whatever it is) decides to release a possibly privacy-problematic feature exploiting the fact that people are distracted by an unstable social situation, it means that it knows that there are big privacy problems with it and it just wants to get away with it for its own interests without having any debates with all the parties involved. I truly hope this is not true, and it is not going to happen.
I agree with Scott Stein when he says that some sort of facial recognition on glasses is inevitable. As I’ve said, it’s a clear use case, so sooner or later it is going to happen. I just hope that when it happens, it is made the right way: people should be in control of who could recognize them (e.g. friends only, friends of friends only, no one, everyone, etc…), they should be able to opt-out, and especially they should decide what data about them could be shared (e.g. just the name, name and contacts, etc…). And then the data about the biometrics of people should be saved in a very secure way to avoid it being leaked. But to understand what the right way is, we need a debate between the technology company, the users, the associations that protect privacy and safety, and the governments.
News worth a mention
Near-eye display revenues to surpass $1B in 2026
According to market research company Omdia,”augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and mixed reality (MR) near-eye display revenue will reach $1.2bn in 2026, representing a year-on-year (YoY) growth rate of over 200%. This growth is primarily driven by the widespread adoption of OLED on silicon (OLEDoS), also known as Micro OLED, in smart glasses and head-mounted display devices.”
I personally don’t agree with everything that is stated in the report, which, for instance, mentions that Meta is going to release the Puffin headset in 2026, while the most recent rumors talk about 2027. But what is interesting is that the numbers of the XR market are growing, and they are, of course, fueled by smartglasses.
Some people in the community are wondering what will happen with HTC, especially for what concerns the VR business. The company is clearly alive, and it has recently announced its smartglasses (the Vive Eagle) and an investment in the content production company Atlas V. But what about the VR business? Will there be a new Vive VR headset after a big VR division at HTC has been sold to Google? I guess we will see…
A headset with CRT display
The WTF news of the week comes from Reddit, and it has been suggested to me by a few VR friends out there (like Alex or Rob). A guy going by the nickname of “dooglehead” on Youtube has created a VR headset… using CRT displays. Yes, the good old big displays used in the old bulky TVs. The result is of course terrible, and probably your eyes will explode if you use it for more than 10 minutes. But still… it works, and this is already awesome by itself.
A native YouTube app comes to Vision Pro
Finally,vGoogle has released an official YouTube app for the Apple Vision Pro, so people with the Apple headset can enjoy all its immersive library. As Road To VR suggests, maybe the Google team has released it only now because it was waiting to release it first on Android XR, or maybe it used the app on Android XR as a starting point for the release on VisionOS. In any case, this is good news for Vision Pro users.
Enjoy the Meta Quest Valentine Sales
There is a new sale of games on the Quest Store, with some games even at 50% off! Have a look at the list of discounted games and buy some of them to support their developers!
Some news about content
- Soul Retreat is a new Quest 3 & 3S app that uses real-world location captures to take users on a relaxing virtual getaway. It is available for free, with a $7/month subscription for Pro users
- Star Citizen 4.6 is adding for the first time an official VR option in the settings menu. The road to full VR implementation is still long, though
- Asymmetric VR horror game Inverse is shutting down in March
- No Man’s Sky’s recent Remnant update adds a gravity gun called “Gravitino Coil”
- Charming clockwork puzzler Tin Hearts: Act 1 has been released on Quest
- Wreckin’ Raccoon, nDreams’ answer to games like I Am Cat and Gorilla Tag, is now available on Quest for $12
- Orcs Must Die! By The Blade, the VR reimagining of the long-running tower-defense series, is available now on Quest 3 and 3S, priced at $20
More info (Soul Retreat)
More info (Star Citizen)
More info (Inverse)
More info (No Man’s Sky)
More info (Tin Hearts: Act 1)
More info (Wreckin’ Raccoon)
More info (Orcs Must Die! By The Blade)
Some reviews about content
- Crossings is a Norse mythology roguelike that manages to mask its flaws with strong, well-designed combat and a moody atmospheric world to explore
- Amelia’s Escape is a promising VR puzzle game, but it has issues with controls and puzzle readability
More info (Crossings)
More info (Amelia’s Escape)
Other news
Disney+ on Apple Vision Pro in Europe doesn’t feature 3D content anymore
Quest 3S is on sale for $250 at Walmart
This post by Niantic explains the difference between Large World Model and Large Geospatial Model
Arcade2TV-XR lets you live the arcade experience in VR with a physical controller
(Thanks to Ivan Aguilar for the tip)
WalkerDev has published an update on the ambitious opensource headset he is working on
News from partners (and friends)
Discover Database Designer
Discover Database Designer, a tool created by the same dev that is working on the opensource headset mentioned above:
Database Designer is a tool that makes creating backends without code simple! Database Designer builds complete PostgreSQL databases with no code… auto-generating SQL, Markdown docs, and C# Entity-Framework scripts locally and with PQC-resistant cryptography!
It is available for free on Steam, and its code is also published on GitHub.
Learn more
Discover FM DUO camera!
Meet the FM DUO, a VR camera that is capable of filming up to 12K @30fps, and 8K @60fps. With built-in RTMP live streaming and 5G connectivity, the FM·DUO will immerse your viewers in real time! The FM·DUO features 2 full-frame CMOS sensors, with 6000 x 6000 pixels each. This allows for high-resolution zooming capabilities. Not only can you narrow in on one subject, but you can also focus on singular details of the subject’s facial expressions, clothing textures, and a multitude of other small details, enabling a much more immersive experience of VR video.
Visit Product Website
Some XR fun
A valid use of Windows Copilot
Funny link
Mr. Bean copying Mr. Steam…
Funny link
The best use case for AI…
Funny link
Donate for good
Like last week, also this week in this final paragraph I won’t ask you to donate to my blog, but to the poor people who are facing the consequences of the war. Please donate to the Red Cross to handle the current humanitarian situation in Ukraine. I will leave you the link to do that below.
Let me take a moment before to thank anyway all my Patreon donors for the support they give to me:
- Alex Gonzalez VR
- DeoVR
- GenVR
- Eduardo Siman
- Jonn Fredericks
- Jean-Marc Duyckaerts
- Reynaldo T Zabala
- Richard Penny
- Terry xR. Schussler
- Ilias Kapouranis
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- Immersive.international
- Nikk Mitchell and the great FXG team
- Jake Rubin
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- Mark G
- Simplex
- Gregory F Gorsuch
- Paul Shay
- Matias Nassi
And now here you are the link to donate:
Support The Red Cross in Ukraine
(Header image by Meta)
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